Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Jerry Brown and Higher Education in California

Intuitively, I would unreservedly
applaud the triumph of a university’s autonomy over those who would seek to
regulate what goes on within its walls.Normally,
when you think of such a conflict, you would be thinking of maintaining an open
research agenda, or keeping teaching free from party political influence.However, when California Governor Jerry Brown
backed down from the fight he was picking with University of California Regents
and administrators and their California State University counterparts, I had
decidedly mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I feel that efforts by
a range of parties (of which Brown was just one) to force the University
towards the provision of online education is not in the interests of California’s
higher education sector and the students it serves.As faculty and others have pointed out, this could
easily turn into a back-door privatisation of higher education.

In his early budget proposals, Brown had
wanted a firm commitment to expanding online coursework, as well as specific
commitments on pushing students through in less time, bringing in greater
numbers of transfer students, and holding down tuition.The increase in funds to UC—after many, many
years of disinvestment by the state—would have been contingent on the
Universities meeting benchmarks in these areas.

I very much disagreed with the
stipulations about online coursework, and I think that asking students to
finish quickly when many of them are being forced to spend much of their time
working to pay for outrageous tuition—which in turn makes it difficult to
create a class schedule that allows them to finish on time—is approaching the
problem from the wrong way around.

But while it would be a little
hypocritical to be too selective about the circumstances in which the state
should and should not step into regulate the Universities (though it might be
fairly said that Brown’s proposals were typically incoherent and blinkered in
their assessment of the problem), I think it would have been very nice to
extract a commitment from the UC Regents about not raising tuition for the foreseeable
future.

In
the end, Brown backed down from all of these demands.Both University systems made sympathetic noises
about not raising tuition in the coming year, but UC left itself plenty of room
to manoeuvre, its spokesperson saying, “We are not etching anything in
stone...Plans change from year to year”.

Yesterday, Brown
claimed that he “had an agreement from both segments [UC and CSU] that they
would carry out online vigorously”, referring to his decision to relax his
benchmarks and rely on some kind of gentleman’s agreement.In a way, this gives the Governor the best of
both worlds.If UC and Cal State decline
to follow up, he can flay them by referencing some vague “understanding” he had
with them.And yet his fingerprints are not
conspicuous on any particular policy, meaning that there’s not much he can be
blamed for if things go pear-shaped (hmmm...remind anyone of Prop 30?).

In truth, the governing bodies of both
systems have shown extraordinary enthusiasm for diminishing the accessibility
and integrity of their institutions, so I suspect that they agree with Brown’s
efforts to denigrate the quality of the education they provide, and that their
reluctance to accept his terms stemmed from a desire to preserve their autonomy
and the pressure they have received from faculty.

I’d be interested to know whether the
Governor had a similar “agreement” about a commitment to restoring
affordability and accessibility as central features of our state’s wonderful
university system, which is increasingly out of reach of too many Californians.

The Huffington Post demonstrated the
danger of Brown’s method of governing by polls when it reported
on a poll which found that “56 percent [of California residents] believe
public university tuition is unaffordable in California.But 46 percent said maintaining excellence
was more important than lowering tuition”.

It’s worth noting that there was no
option which asked Californians to contemplate the possibility of maintaining
excellence alongside affordability, or even the connection between the two.Nor did the poll probe the link between the
devil’s dilemma it presented to voters as gospel on the one hand, and the deep
structural wounds that voters and opportunists like Brown have inflicted on the
state over decades, making it quite literally ungovernable over the long
term.

Given the extent to which California’s
polity has been broken by careless use of the initiative system, the massive
intervention of special interests, and the ongoing construction of a
massively-overburdened constitution, you might as well poke at pigeon entrails
or try to read the mind of a madman as try to divine Californians’ views about
higher education using such absurd polling questions.

And yet polls like this one drive both
politicians’ and the public’s sense of what is possible.Brown has set himself up as an executor of the
“people’s will” rather than a governor who will govern, and this half-witted
haruspicy is precisely the “method” of management to which he has committed
himself.Tragically, the choice that
such polls lay out is stark.Either we
pursue excellence in research, which many higher education leaders increasingly
believe means turning to a privatised if not for-profit structure, or else we sacrifice
that excellence to allow the University to pursue its socioeconomic commitment
to Californians.

That is an awful choice.And it is a false one.The fortunes of California’s universities are
bound up with the welfare of the state itself.And if we give up on the ability of our foremost institution to carry
out its mission—representing excellence in research, providing a fine
education, and making itself a place where all Californians feel welcome—that doesn’t
say much about the ability of our society to master its challenges in the
service of some common good.

The problems that prevent the
Universities from carrying out their mission are the very same ones which
bedevil the Golden State’s foreseeable future unless we decide to hack at the
root of the problem by embracing comprehensive and rational political reform
(for a great treatise on the topic, see—you guessed it!—Mark Paul and Joe
Mathews’ California Crackup: How Reform
Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It).Instead of thinking how we can wreck the
Universities as expeditiously as possible—and thereby wreck our society—we should
be thinking about how we expand the realm of the possible to better plough a progressive
path between the fork in the road, which as it exists, has nothing to offer
Californians who believe that public institutions can serve the public welfare,
and that higher education is a central part of that welfare.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.